Jokingly, whenever I’m at a convention out of town or visiting folks in other states, I say “I’m from Frisco, Texas.” If I get that look, I say “If you don’t know where Frisco is, Dallas is our suburb 20 miles south.”

To answer the question - I'd consider any city which has an established urban core to be excluded from the suburb definition. I'm sure others opinions will vary on this. To me, Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton are the only places I've spent much time that don't [*]feel like suburbs. Certainly bits and pieces of other cities around feel like proper cities, but just lack that defining characteristic somewhere in there.

It's interesting to see where those 121/DNT area workers live: mostly in the immediate area of Frisco and Plano, as well as other places north of the office space in McKinney and Little Elm.

Compare that to those working in Greater Downtown, where there's a clear drop-off at Northwest Highway and then again more notably at Bush Turnpike.

I bet all this Frisco development just further divides the labor market. Increased traffic will make it even less appealing to drive north on the DNT, and more development north of Legacy West will be even further away from the jobs hubs down south.

I have a theory that the suburbs will be the future slums. Dallas' northern suburbs would be an exception due to the fact that so many corporate headquarter relocations are moving out there. Nonetheless, the suburbs will be the future slums because the city is where the money and young professionals are going to.

joshua.dodd wrote:I have a theory that the suburbs will be the future slums. Dallas' northern suburbs would be an exception due to the fact that so many corporate headquarter relocations are moving out there. Nonetheless, the suburbs will be the future slums because the city is where the money and young professionals are going to.

"The Suburbanization of Poverty" is the official academic name for this phenomenon. Basically, core areas are doing well as they get rehabbed and people discover the good things about close-in city living, and exurbs are still doing well because everything can be shiny and new. In the inner-ring suburbs, though, the houses are getting old (and not in the good way), and the deferred maintanence bills are coming due. And without the city amenities to draw people or tax base to pay for repairs, they're going into a downward spiral.

While it's more strongly focused in high-cost coastal metros (where the poor are being priced out) and decaying rust-belt metros (where reductions in economic vitality are starker), it's still occuring in places like Dallas. Check out the difference in percentage of families below the poverty line between 2000 and 2011-2015:

Inside city limits, it didn't change too much (if anything, that North Dallas low-poverty bubble got a little bigger). The major difference is in those inner-ring suburbs: Garland, Richardson, Farmer's Branch, Irving. Even Plano and Carrolton weren't immune.

"The Suburbanization of Poverty" is the official academic name for this phenomenon. Basically, core areas are doing well as they get rehabbed and people discover the good things about close-in city living, and exurbs are still doing well because everything can be shiny and new. In the inner-ring suburbs, though, the houses are getting old (and not in the good way), and the deferred maintenance bills are coming due.

My opinion is that this is too 'point in time' and that those cheap places in suburbs will be the next generation's incubators. Houses getting old is something that happens everywhere - it's 'direness' is overstated in suburbs, and 'quality' of housing will not save a place (look at the palaces in Detroit that were abandoned) but only jobs and access. I don't think exurbs will ever be true slums subservient to the main cities - the costs of transportation are just too high - they will be abandoned like the old rest stop towns on I40 or they will become cities of their own right.

I can't draw a conclusion from two pictures, it would be better to see that map put in motion over at least 10-15 years and view the impact of the recession, immigration and so on. I know poverty in DFW is spreading out into areas that previously had not seen it as more lower-income residents move into single family houses and apartments as housing becomes less affordable. But the region as a whole has expanded so much in this time frame with too many moving parts to draw an adequate conclusion from just those two illustrations.

There is something extremely alarming about those two pictures. It really shows the gross surge in poverty over the past 15 years and puts into perspective the collapse in the American Middle Class.

Another reason why I see the suburbs as the future slums is because of the cheaply built housing developments. Most of these houses built by such companies as KB Homes are of poor quality, at best, and over inflated prices. Over time as the homes' poor qualities begin to show with foundation troubles and other issues, the prices for these homes are going to plunge. This is why I would never buy a new suburban home in one of these quickly built subdivisions. Over time you will lose money and the value of the homes are going to depreciate until they become slums.

I know poverty in DFW is spreading out into areas that previously had not seen it as more lower-income residents move into single family houses and apartments as housing becomes less affordable.

I think you have this backwards- poverty spread to mostly single family areas where it didn't exist before because the houses were cheap. Houses getting more expensive will concentrate poverty. So the sprawl of DFW has also sprawled poverty, whether you consider that good or bad. DFW built such small amounts of multi-family the past 30 years (less than 10% of total area housing per year most years - the past few where it's close to 50% are serious anomalies historically) I don't think you can pin this on high rents or apartments.

joshua.dodd wrote:There is something extremely alarming about those two pictures. It really shows the gross surge in poverty over the past 15 years and puts into perspective the collapse in the American Middle Class.

Another reason why I see the suburbs as the future slums is because of the cheaply built housing developments. Most of these houses built by such companies as KB Homes are of poor quality, at best, and over inflated prices. Over time as the homes' poor qualities begin to show with foundation troubles and other issues, the prices for these homes are going to plunge. This is why I would never buy a new suburban home in one of these quickly built subdivisions. Over time you will lose money and the value of the homes are going to depreciate until they become slums.

Suburbs have nothing on Dallas. The city is over the top on poverty with almost 300,000 people living below the line, more than the entire population of Plano and is the absolute worst among big cities with Children. We can point all day to the suburbs and talk about how horrible they are going to be but if you want to see that today just look at the city of Dallas, it is already here.

Joe, Josh and I interviewed all the city's department heads and key staff. We gathered as much data as we could (they had a lot). We analyzed and then mapped out all of the city's revenue streams by parcel. We then did the same for all of the city's expenses. This was the most comprehensive geographic analysis of a city's finances that I've ever seen completed. When we finished, we had a three dimensional map showing what parts of the city generated more revenue than expense (in business terms, this would be called profit) and what parts of the city generated more expense than revenue (again, in business terms, this is considered a loss).

Here's that map. In accounting terms, green equals profit and red equals loss. The higher the block goes, the larger the amount of profit/loss. If you have a sense of the basic layout of North American cities post World War II, you can figure out pretty easily what is going on here.

tumblr_inline_ojn60vJrGb1r97ndl_540.png

There are two questions I'm commonly asked when I tell this story. The first is: how did this happen? The second: what do we do now?

The way this happened is pretty simple. At Strong Towns, we call it the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Through a combination of federal incentives, state programs and private capital, cities were able to rapidly grow by expanding horizontally. This provided the local government with the immediate revenues that come from new growth -- permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax -- and, in exchange, the city takes on the long term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure. The money comes in handy in the present while the future obligation is, well....a long time in the future.

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To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

“In about 10-20 years, Frisco will be the ‘Dallas’ and Celina, Prosper and some other fourth-ring suburbs, as I call them, will be the suburbs to Frisco,” Wooten said. “Frisco will have its own ring of suburbs with people commuting to Frisco.”

“In about 10-20 years, Frisco will be the ‘Dallas’ and Celina, Prosper and some other fourth-ring suburbs, as I call them, will be the suburbs to Frisco,” Wooten said. “Frisco will have its own ring of suburbs with people commuting to Frisco.”

I just read this post... Uh huh, I'm still waiting for Palo Alto to be the next SF.

“In about 10-20 years, Frisco will be the ‘Dallas’ and Celina, Prosper and some other fourth-ring suburbs, as I call them, will be the suburbs to Frisco,” Wooten said. “Frisco will have its own ring of suburbs with people commuting to Frisco.”

I just read this post... Uh huh, I'm still waiting for Palo Alto to be the next SF.

I know plenty of people who live in SF and commute every day to Palo Alto. This will envitably happen as the cheaper homes are pushed even further out in to the prarie. As long as Frisco and the entire Legacy mile remain such an incredible hot job relocation center this is inevitably the future.

I just read this post... Uh huh, I'm still waiting for Palo Alto to be the next SF.

I know plenty of people who live in SF and commute every day to Palo Alto. This will envitably happen as the cheaper homes are pushed even further out in to the prarie. As long as Frisco and the entire Legacy mile remain such an incredible hot job relocation center this is inevitably the future.

I agree somewhat.

The thing is the homes in Frisco and West Plano aren't cheaper in comparison to most DFW cities. So I don't think these cities will absorb all the new residents that come to DFW. In addition most of the new construction in these cities, particularly Frisco and McKinney are for the most part SF unit homes.

Not to mention the Plano Residents are fighting densifying right now.

That'll push people away further into the boonies.. Lucas, Anna , Melissa etc.

Frisco/Plano are in a way reminiscent to Palo Alto ,Menlo Park but with much less affluent residents and with much less job creation. These DFW cities attract relocations.

And I think that's the biggest difference. It's hard to predict future "job creation" if you're for the most part creating jobs by relocating companies. This reminds of Las Colinas and other Hot Job Centers that have their moment and then calm down.

It'll be interesting if it will be sustainable. If so DFW will become even more decentralized. Dallas has to step up it's game. In a way that's good for the city as it can't become complacent. If Midtown is a successful then Dallas will be able to offset some of the sprawl.

It's hard to predict future "job creation" if you're for the most part creating jobs by relocating companies

And Collin County's future job creation prospects are terrible - the closest major university (UT Dallas in Richardson) is decent and expanding but that'll be producing jobs 20 years from now. The education within the county - SMU @ Legacy is token and unremarkable, and Collin County Community College is putting together a bond to build subpar satellite campuses in upcoming suburbs rather than expanding programs in any central location - so it's be available -but mediocre. So exceptional job creation is going to have to continue to be parasitic rather than organic.

That means young minds have to leave the county to be educated, and if they come back or not it's a tossup.

Plano is already having to add language to their contracts to keep companies in the city from abandoning locations in the east to move west to the 'hot' area. How sustainable can that be?

If the anti-density crowd wins the upcoming elections in McKinney, Allen, and Plano (likely) and the new folks follow through with their ideas, then Collin County's growth might hit a wall. Frisco's guiding mayor through their impressive growth has already moved on.

Yeah, Palo Alto is Palo Alto because of Stanford and a giant bay that makes it difficult to relocate to new hot areas while maintaining similar commutes for most workers. Why would Frisco have much staying power once its buildings start to get old?

tanzoak wrote:Yeah, Palo Alto is Palo Alto because of Stanford and a giant bay that makes it difficult to relocate to new hot areas while maintaining similar commutes for most workers. Why would Frisco have much staying power once its buildings start to get old?

Is there some reason why it wouldn't? People have been writing the epitaph for Plano and Frisco for almost as long as I have lived here. First it was so far it would never be, except then it was, then it was so far it would never grow, then it did, and again and again it grows and prospers and pushes further out and people still say it won't last. There is no evidence, no fact that supports anything except more of what has already come to be.

tanzoak wrote:Yeah, Palo Alto is Palo Alto because of Stanford and a giant bay that makes it difficult to relocate to new hot areas while maintaining similar commutes for most workers. Why would Frisco have much staying power once its buildings start to get old?

Is there some reason why it wouldn't? People have been writing the epitaph for Plano and Frisco for almost as long as I have lived here. First it was so far it would never be, except then it was, then it was so far it would never grow, then it did, and again and again it grows and prospers and pushes further out and people still say it won't last. There is no evidence, no fact that supports anything except more of what has already come to be.

The reason why it wouldn't is because the only real advantage Frisco conveys is newness. There's no university creating new businesses and drawing in existing ones. It's not the center of the transportation network. It offers no cultural or other amenity premium. Yes, it's near many affluent communities, but it's not like other nearby suburbs don't offer the same thing.

In 20-30 years, once all the available non-single family land is fully built out, what does Frisco offer? A bunch of declining 20 year old buildings too valuable to redevelop but no longer providing the same growth (and tax revenue) they once did.

Palo Alto doesn't decay because of Stanford. Midtown Manhattan doesn't decay because you've *got* to be in the middle of it all. Central Dallas, while certainly not either of those places, at least offers something unique to the region and has the ability to intensify a crapload of nearby land, so has more of an ability to continue to boom long-term.

I've literally never heard an "epitaph" for Plano or Frisco, so I don't know what you're talking about there. And this is a decades-long process. But all neighborhoods (and towns) are either growing or declining, and there's a pretty easily written decline story written for Frisco in a couple of decades.

^They said the same thing about Dallas decades ago. I remember a particular article in the Chicago Tribune a long time ago detailing all the flaws in Dallas and how it was just a "dumb city" that would never go anywhere for many of the same reasons described above. And in terms of decay many would argue that SF and NYC are already in decline and the chasm between the rich and poor is so wide that unless you make a six figure salary you can forget living there unless you like living in a house full of people. I hear people talk about how Plano and Frisco are so unsustainable. Nearly 400 people a day move into this region, most of them move into "The Wedge" which defines this area. As long as that continues to be the case what we see will be sustained, when that dries up people can start to worry. Just because Stanford isn't located in Frisco or Plano does not matter. UTD is here and is growing, SMU is in Plano, UNT opened a campus in Frisco, all of them feeding the tech companies that continue to thrive. Instead of bashing this part of DFW it would be awesome if people would recognize the value Plano and Frisco are bringing to the entire region, their contribution to the overall economy because without them life here would be much different.

The wedge includes much of Dallas County, most of Collin, Denton and even part of Tarrant so would appear to be consistent with that claim. That would not suggest that people don't move to other parts of the metroplex because we all know they do but most people will try to move as close to their jobs as they can. Where are most of the jobs? Where is most of the office space in north Texas? It's all in the wedge. Property values would also back this up since most of the insane pace of home building and home bidding exists inside the wedge.

...growing pains are an annoying reality now for many Collin residents, whether they're feeling overrun by high-density developments, struggling with higher property taxes or getting stuck in traffic. Some are speaking out against the boom.

The remarkable growth has sprouted civic groups determined to slow it down. Anecdotes of people hoping to settle on land near the country upset because so many people are moving in the country is becoming neighborhood; they'll have to move in a couple years to get back to the edge. Anecdotes of getting stuck in traffic, complaints of excessive multifamily dwellings offering residence to an excessive amount of people....

hrumph.

Living on the edge, and there's a handful of edges here, is something that can be managed. Building a house on two acres located in the zone where rural slowly transitions to suburban can deliver a fantastic lifestyle, but if the next city down the road paves the meander, you're screwed.

Collin County ought to lead the creation of a new masterplan for the top half of the Metroplex.

The problem with master plans is that the folks who write the plans usually have a totally different agenda than the majority of the population. Look at Forward Dallas. It's #1 priority is increasing density to increase property tax revenue. But the reality is that 90% of residents don't want that density and the problems that it brings.

^Just like the guy who's upset Celina has plans to roll-out suburbs all over the open space he seeks, folks in the city are equally surprised and resistant to the reality of where they live.

And all the problems brought on by increased density are balanced by all the solutions of the same density. The role of nostalgia must remain nuanced in the future of a growing city. And frankly, those "90% of residents who don't want that density," well, they're going to have to adapt or move to the first ring satellite & suburban areas, because there are far more people searching for the density, waiting for it to happen so they can get in there and have a city life.

It's a very natural process; frequently it's a combination of nostalgia and expired preconceptions that keep people stubborn holding onto something they think is theirs, but isn't, all the while what they feel is escaping has simply rolled into a different part of town.

I'm still looking for those "solutions" coming from density. Urbanistas keep claiming that density makes cities more efficient, but the numbers don't agree. Dense urban areas pretty much universally have higher tax rates and higher costs of living. Places like Tokyo, London and New York should be the cheapest to live, yet they're the most expensive.

Interesting charts by tanzoak. And the one from Strong Towns posted by art_suckz is what convinced me to become a New Urbanist a couple of years ago.

Suburban infrastructure simply is not self-sustaining. It can't pay for itself with the insufficient tax revenue generated by the homes and businesses that locate there. If it is properly maintained, it is only through the federal-government-Ponzi-scheme approach of spreading money from this state to that one, while just letting other places fall apart, unmaintained. Garland Road above Northwest Hwy is a good example: you can tell from its condition that the city has simply given up on maintaining it because they can't afford it.

I don't know if this means the northern suburbs's infrastructure will have fallen apart in 30 years, but if they are maintained it will be only through borrowing or spreading money around from other jurisdictions, while letting other areas fall apart.

cconat2000 wrote:I don't know if this means the northern suburbs's infrastructure will have fallen apart in 30 years, but if they are maintained it will be only through borrowing or spreading money around from other jurisdictions, while letting other areas fall apart.

It seems a few of these suburbs are becoming more dense as a way to avoid this from happening in the future? If things keep up, Plano will have quite the city center in 30 years time.

cconat2000 wrote:I don't know if this means the northern suburbs's infrastructure will have fallen apart in 30 years, but if they are maintained it will be only through borrowing or spreading money around from other jurisdictions, while letting other areas fall apart.

It seems a few of these suburbs are becoming more dense as a way to avoid this from happening in the future? If things keep up, Plano will have quite the city center in 30 years time.

Interesting that 'suburban infrastructure is not self-sustaining' is persistent phrasing. This kinda assumes the federal-government-Ponzi-scheme approach of spreading money will ever go away... also assumes that funding is not how half of everything is funded....

People also adapt. They adapt themselves and they adapt the environment.

I get it, though, and do not disagree with how wacky and expensive suburban environment building can be. Building a better urban environment is the only way many/most of the suburban inhabitants will ever understand.

tamtagon wrote:I get it, though, and do not disagree with how wacky and expensive suburban environment building can be. Building a better urban environment is the only way many/most of the suburban inhabitants will ever understand.

Is this really true? I know I hear it a lot and then watch the cost of living in urban centers continue to rise beyond the reach of anybody that isn't making a large enough salary to pay the cost of living in the city. San Francisco and pretty much all of the Bay area is out of reach for anybody making less than six figures unless you want to live with your family or friends. How many people that live near the urban core are being forced out because their "affordable" home is bulldozed in favor of a high-rise apartment tower charging $2,000/month for rent or more. Austin is the same way, ask anybody that lives there and pays property taxes. Dallas has a huge problem with poverty that I never hear anybody on here address. More people live in poverty in Dallas than the entire population of Plano yet the city continues to approve tower after tower that does nothing to bridge the gap between what people can afford and what is being built. Fact is they can't do it, not in any significant way. They throw out a few affordable units here and there but the fact is they don't know what to do. If they did they would be doing it.

tamtagon wrote:I get it, though, and do not disagree with how wacky and expensive suburban environment building can be. Building a better urban environment is the only way many/most of the suburban inhabitants will ever understand.

Is this really true? I know I hear it a lot and then watch the cost of living in urban centers continue to rise beyond the reach of anybody that isn't making a large enough salary to pay the cost of living in the city. San Francisco and pretty much all of the Bay area is out of reach for anybody making less than six figures unless you want to live with your family or friends. How many people that live near the urban core are being forced out because their "affordable" home is bulldozed in favor of a high-rise apartment tower charging $2,000/month for rent or more. Austin is the same way, ask anybody that lives there and pays property taxes. Dallas has a huge problem with poverty that I never hear anybody on here address. More people live in poverty in Dallas than the entire population of Plano yet the city continues to approve tower after tower that does nothing to bridge the gap between what people can afford and what is being built. Fact is they can't do it, not in any significant way. They throw out a few affordable units here and there but the fact is they don't know what to do. If they did they would be doing it.

Affordable housing in Desirable places is tricky. No one has completely figured it out.

You can't expect a developer to cut into their margins or leave profit on the table; they're out there to Maximize ROI and rightfully so. Make more incentives if you want them to have those affordable units in the new towers.

But ultimately The city doesn't make life easier for themselves either. Look at their zoning laws. These new Towers could be more affordable if they allowed Developments with smaller parking ratios. The Dallas Quality of Life Committee doesn't allow it.

I'm positive there are areas in town that would do well with little to no Parking. Micro units with minimal or no parking could be more affordable than market rate apartments. Why not encourage more of that?

The City also has to find ways to allow more housing in established neighborhoods (NIMBYS). If We don't allow Developments in areas the Developments go elsewhere and sometimes to neighborhoods where the affordable housing is. This causes displacement and increases the need for more affordable housing.

In essence, housing is not affordable because quite frankly there aren't enough homes. Dallas has to do everything it can do to allow more housing to be built; plain and simple.

tamtagon wrote:I get it, though, and do not disagree with how wacky and expensive suburban environment building can be. Building a better urban environment is the only way many/most of the suburban inhabitants will ever understand.

Is this really true? I know I hear it a lot and then watch the cost of living in urban centers continue to rise beyond the reach of anybody that isn't making a large enough salary to pay the cost of living in the city.

I was thinking mostly about how expensive highways and basic infrastructure have become, and how the federal govt pays for a lot of it.

Cost of living is a whole 'nuther helpline. But, the most desirable of anything is almost always also the most expensive. The anecdote of roommates in a closet-sized apartment has been well known for along time regarding living in Manhattan, San Francisco etc. It's crazy expensive to live there because it's crazy nice to live there.

tamtagon wrote:... the most desirable of anything is almost always also the most expensive. The anecdote of roommates in a closet-sized apartment has been well known for along time regarding living in Manhattan, San Francisco etc. It's crazy expensive to live there because it's crazy nice to live there.

The market economy is what's called a tournament model. The CEO, no matter how personally all-consuming the role is, isn't actually earning every penny, but we get vastly more performance out of everyone underneath the C-suite by making them compete and be filtered by performance to ever have a chance at taking home that stunning paycheck. It is a pretty nasty system because the average contributor to productivity is going to earn substantially less than the average share of the productivity, and so people may not be actually working hard for the carrot but just to stay ahead of the people behind them.

Pitting us against each other in this way is probably inimical to innovation and long-term health of human sociality. But translated into city and regional context, the Sunbelt suburbs have seen that they can "move up" in the tax-base tournament, much as the Sunbelt central cities did against the "C-suite" of coastal metropolitan America. Legacy cities are loaded with maintenance commitments and vested interests, some of them outmoded but hard to switch from. Greenfield suburbs can become "nice" in ways more interesting to a lucrative subset of taxpayers, as a shortcut up the value chain, outflanking central neighborhoods. By the time their own infrastructures age, maybe flying cars will be a thing.

Until we have something on the books to stop the excessive funneling of shared funds away from existing infrastructure maintenance & update needs to the new and shiny and happy "usurp-burbs", innovating to a better urban environment is the only way an active majority of suburban inhabitants will ever understand the Judgement of Solomon rolling through the cities, especially Sunbelt cities.

Tnexster wrote:How many people that live near the urban core are being forced out because their "affordable" home is bulldozed in favor of a high-rise apartment tower charging $2,000/month for rent or more.

Sorry, I have to stop you right there.

a) There's very limited housing construction going on here. Over the past two years, the 1.3 million City of Dallas has permitted as many multifam units as the entire 4.7 million SF metro area. Also, most construction is on brownfield industrial lots or surface parking. Very rarely replaces existing residential.

b) $2000/mo.. if only! I live in a pretty slummy part of Oakland and pay $1800 for a 540 square foot 1-bedroom apartment on the bottom floor of a three-unit house that is freshly renovated but certainly not new. A 1BR in a new blah midrise in Downtown Oakland goes for $3500. In a fancy new high-rise in SF, a 1BR can go for $5000. It is bonkers over here.

Dallas is a bit unique because of the explosive growth in residents and the lag in new home/apartment construction. Dallas home prices are either the 1st-, 2nd- or 3rd-fastest-rising in the nation (depending on what study and which timeframe you look at). So the problem is worse there, though it's arguably a good problem to have.

The new towers will never work for lower-income people on any significant scale. New construction is for higher-income people. Lower-income people live in older buildings. Urban, walkable construction is cheaper for lower-income people because it doesn't require every adult in the household to buy a car. Edward Glaeser (brilliant guy) points out that you generally have more low-income people in urban, walkable areas not because urbanism causes poverty, but because poor people move there to avoid having to buy a car.

Suburbanism is astronomically expensive also because, to use an example Charles Marohn likes to give, Omaha in the 1940s had (IIRC) 6 feet of roads, sidewalks, sewers, etc per capita, and today it's 40 feet per capita (those numbers may be slightly off, but they're very close to that). Spreading out by surrounding homes with undeveloped land (aka yards) is really expensive.

What Dallas needs to accommodate the poor (in terms of housing) is several decades more of constructing dense housing in walkable areas so that eventually you have enough of it that some is old and affordable for them. Right now every dense building is relatively new and therefore expensive.

I love the idea of micro-apartments, though. And "usurp-burbs"! LOL. Well done.

I was wondering about that myself. What of the original query? And does it ever become "post suburb"?

Is everything outside an urban core a suburb by virtue of it's location alone? As Oak Lawn dissolves into Downtown does it cease to be a suburb, becoming a less distinguishable neighborhood in an urban core? Dallas is a great laboratory for predicting the future, as earlier posts point out. As urban knowledge and design evolve, can satellites like Frisco, Plano, Addison and others grow to be urban core environments in their own right (be open minded)? Certainly they hope to, if within suburban norms. What would be visible signs of that "creeping evolution" in the greater fabric of DFW? Would we see fewer "chain restaurant neon" along the streets or highways? Fewer neighborhoods with names like "Cliff Hollow" where neither cliff nor hollow exist? More parking lots to parks? Fewer pad sites with maze like parking lots that extend from property line to property line, and preclude the entering and exiting by any car not using that particular establishment? Would insular corporate buildings along highways be designed closer together and be connected by sidewalks? Several local satellites are doing "their version" of urban now. Where do they succeed, and where are the suburban "dead giveaways"? Finally, can the cheaply built boom suburbs/real estate of yesteryear be retooled to fit any scenario other than looming decay?

What would be visible signs of that "creeping evolution" in the greater fabric of DFW?

About 10 years ago (or maybe a bit more) there were arguments that the most walkable neighborhoods in Dallas were the apartments along the Dallas North Tollway, because there were so few places in DFW with that population density (>10k per sq mile) that were even kind of walkable. So that's how far we've come, and the visible signs are still the same.

The authors contend that the next few decades will entail a reinvention of the suburbs, their dead malls and strip centers, as well as the re-purposing of thousands of acres of decaying surface parking into new urban environs. The book presents strategies and interventions, using successful "retrofits" to illustrate their points. Germane to issues facing DFW and other places where obsolete malls and strip centers contribute to "blight", it includes many approaches to redevelopment which do not involve "a scorched Earth policy", or demo-ing everything and starting from scratch. The tome itself is a rather dense read, but a TED talk by Ms. Dunham-Jones explains the jist of it pretty well @ the following address. https://youtu.be/J_uTsrxfYWQ.

In just the past few years, however, the suburbs, newly energized, have roared back. The Economist reported in April that the back-to-the-city movement hit its zenith in 2012. Since then, according to new demographic analyses, growth rates have quadrupled in the exurbs, those suburbs on the outer fringes of metropolitan areas. At the same time, urban growth slowed by half.

"In 2017," the magazine said, "five times as many Americans moved to New York's suburbs as moved to the Big Apple."